468 Making It New: 1900–1945two worlds and in captivity to his job, it was greeted with acclaim. Success rendered
Di Donato silent for nearly twenty years; and his later books, two novels and two
biographies, never received the same reception or a wide readership. But the story
of the life of his father, the “Christ in concrete,” remains a central event in immigrant
writing of the time; and the account of his untimely death, in particular, tells a very
different story, of the fate of the poor from the Old World in the New, from the one
told in “America and I.”
On the night before Good Friday, Geremio enjoys “the crowning point of his life.”
He buys a house. “Twenty years he had helped to mold the New World,” he reflects.
“And now he was to have a house of his own!” “Tomorrow is a day for great things,”
he tells his wife, “... and the day on which our Lord died for us.” But, although it is
Good Friday, it is not a day of rest for Geremio on the building site where he works.
Di Donato describes in pulsating, rhythmic prose how the “job loomed up damp,
shivery gray. Its giant members waiting.” “The great Good Job, he did not love,”
Geremio thinks bitterly, as he buckles down to it with his fellow workers, also
Italian-American. And his pleas to the “padrone,” the contractor, that the
underpinning should not be left unsafe, “just for the sake of a little profit,” fall on
deaf ears. “Lissenyawopbastard,” the contractor, who is Anglo-American tells him.
“If you don’t like it, you know what you can do!” With terrible, tragic inevitability,
the building then collapses. “The floor vomited,” the reader learns, and “the strongly
shaped body” of Geremio “thudded as a worthless sack among the giant debris.
Other workers die at once. Geremio, though, is left trapped beneath a huge hopper
gushing gray concrete from its mouth. And, despite the efforts of rescuers, he suffers
a slow, agonizing death as he is drowned, crushed in the concrete. Entombed in the
“icy wet” concrete, with his brain in the end only “miraculously alive,” Geremio rages
over the waste of his life, in oppressive labor and now in death. “I’ve never known
the freedom I wanted in my heart,” he thinks. “There has been a terrible mistake!
A cruel crime! The world is not right!” “I say you can’t take my life!” he calls voicelessly
to those who have oppressed him, stolen his life in a double sense. Then, to his
now-dead friends and fellow workers: “Men! Do you hear me? We must follow
the desires within us for the world has been taken from us: we who made the world!”
But the life, and the world, that have never been his, in a sense, are now literally,
ineluctably taken from him as “the concrete slowly contracted and squeezed his skull
out of shape.” The death of Geremio is tragic in the true meaning of that word, since
he has achieved a recognition at the instant of dying. He knows now that “the world
is not right,” where the blame lies and what is needed to right it. The feeling of
“queer,” “fathomless” dissatisfaction he often felt during his life has crystallized into
an understanding of shared identity and injustice, and the need for shared action: a
knowledge that, reading his story, we are now asked to assume. In Christ in Concrete,
story and novel, the author gives voice to the socially silenced. That is what “America
and I” does too. What the voice tells us is very different, though; its message is
redemptive but also passionately radical.
Significant immigration into the United States from Asia began in 1849,
when Chinese men began to arrive in order to escape internal conflicts. This earlyGGray_c04.indd 468ray_c 04 .indd 468 8 8/1/2011 7:54:01 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 01 AM